


Theory of the Ethereal Body

by NextToSomething



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, Blind Character, Blindness, Consensual Infidelity, Drama, F/M, Infidelity, Romance, Word Porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 15:52:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2587193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NextToSomething/pseuds/NextToSomething
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This house wrests such wickedness from her bones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Theory of the Ethereal Body

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts), [audreyii_fic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreyii_fic/gifts).



> Prequell to [Well Read](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1655411/chapters/3511511), a lokane drabble in [this collection](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1655411/chapters/3511406). 
> 
> As a gift to my absolute bestie, [startraveller776](http://archiveofourown.org/users/startraveller776), this is a prequel to an AU drabble I wrote some time ago, also as a gift—to [audreyii-fic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/audreyii_fic). Reading the drabble, [Well Read](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1655411/chapters/3511511), is recommended, but not required. 
> 
> Twisted and wrong, like Lokane should be. 
> 
> Huge thank you to [thereallimegreenandloki](http://thereallimegreenandloki.tumblr.com) on Tumblr for looking this over for me!!

“Jane Foster.”

Loki’s greeting is familiar, uttered by rote, and as irritating as it is thrilling. Not thrilling; unsettling. Not thrilling.

“It’s Odinson, now, brother.”

Jane tries, oh how she tries, to match his derision with her words. He always greets her with such cool insouciance, such indifference. He always calls her by her maiden name, and indeed, makes her feel a maid. “Foster.” Such a girlish concept, to kindle and to nurture, when she, a suitably wedded woman of arguable pedigree, has so little inclination to do so. Anymore, at least.

 

She had no idea that marriage had so dampening an effect on the cultivating of scholarly pursuit. The only pursuits she has time to foster now are the entertaining the unentertainable (her husband’s jaded friends, far too worldly to be wooed by the highest of high teas), impressing the unimpressable (Thor’s stoic father, Odin) and evading the unevadable (Loki.)

No wonder her retort sounds feeble on her lips. Even “brother” rings thin, as if she does not believe the title to be true.

Or worse, that she wishes it were not.

“Forgive me, sister-mine. I keep forgetting.”

Jane doubts he has forgotten anything in his miserable existence.

She turns back to attend her original, embarking on two of the insurmountable tasks she’s been given since her marriage to Thor: finding stolen moments, like this one, to secret away another book to her room, and ignoring Loki.

The latter succinctly extinguishes the hope for either with, “Are you quite sure you are in the right section?”

“Are you quite sure that you are?” Her retort is petty, unkind. Jane does not make a habit of mocking the disabled, and her cold ridicule of his blindness is a cruelty as foreign to her as the Norwegian Odin’s orchestrated dinners always dissolve into.

This house wrests such wickedness from her bones.

And like a viper, the vessel of poison rather than the victim, Loki smiles. The gesture is more akin to a wound than to happiness, the action slicing open his face in a bestial show of utter satisfaction at her petulance. From the edges of the smoked glass of his spectacles, Jane can see the corners of his ruined eyes crinkle in mirth.

“Oh, quite sure,” he says, his voice low and his chin high. “It just seems curious that you would be perusing Lodge’s Theory of the Ethereal Body when Thor has gone to such great lengths to procure the latest Dickens for you.”

“I have little interest in fiction and—” Jane stops short, realizing. “How did you know what book I selected?”

He steps closer to her and she bumps into the bookshelf at her back. With spindly fingers, he plucks the tome from her hands. He nimbly caresses the lovely leather binding, and Jane suddenly feels as if she were witness to a very intimate act. He lifts the book to his face and reverently presses his parted lips to the spine before answering.

"I know every inch of this room, this room above all others," he whispers into the spine.

The movement of his mouth on the leather and the slow stroke of his fingers on the binding hypnotizes Jane. To coerce such revelations with only his hands—to have such perception of his world based solely on the weight of the book in his grasp and the number of steps taken—this unlocking of a darkened world has been a fascination of Jane’s since the moment she met Thor’s younger brother.

She wanted to believe that the deference with which he held her book tugged at the academic side of her pneuma, how she too respected these bound tomes as the keepers of the ages of intellect. But the slow stroke of his fingers and the drag of his lips over the gold words of the spine—perhaps that is how he reads, through the touch of the delicate thin-ness of the skin of his lips—tugged at a much more base facet of her consciousness.

And quite suddenly, Jane wishes to just have her book back so she may flee this sudden and unwelcome arousal.

This is when Loki steps closer still

“I seem to have underestimated you, little Jane.”

His words are still whispered dagger-sharp and feather-soft into the spine of her book. The sweet lull of it calls her to lay her hands upon his on the book, to try to sort the world out through the tips of her fingers like he.

She resists.

“Underestimated me in what way?” Her words sound drowsy.

He smiles, though it is a much pleasanter gesture than before. “I had thought Thor only picked you because you were comely.”

She realizes the words are cruel, but something in the thrall he is spinning keeps her indignation at bay. Instead, it coaxes an invitation from her.

“And how do you know I am comely?”

He chuckles darkly. “By science, you must be.”

His tongue darts out, the tip lightly brushing the leather of the book. Jane very nearly moans.

“Your voice is of the optimum pitch, not so high that it grates upon a man’s patience. Low enough that he might imagine how your sighs of contentment would vibrate across his skin. Not flat and monotone, but nearly musical, and so inviting of cajoling his name from your lips in every pitch you possess.”

He’s even closer now, and Jane’s eyes have fallen closed. Hearing his voice is stimulation enough.

“You are petite in stature.” Jane can hear him place the book high up on the shelf, and suddenly his hands are at her waist. “And small in the waist. Both fashionable traits to have.”

She can feel, so acutely, the surprising heat of his hands that settle so purposefully at her middle. She can smell the sandlewood of his soap, something she is sure she would have noticed before. She should open her eyes. She should see where she is falling.

“And your hair.” His fingers grip a measure more tightly at her. “Your hair is heavy, thick and long. It was down, that morning before the wedding, when I came to offer my congratulations. You were so scarcely dressed, I thought your lady’s maid would die of fright from my coming in the room. Do you remember?”

“Yes.” Jane licks her lips, dry from the shuddering breaths his proximity is eliciting. “I told her you couldn’t see me.”

“Oh, but what is seeing, Jane? What do I know of sight? Of color, or pattern? These seemingly simple concepts so thoughtlessly referenced in every book I manage to consume. What is that to me?”

His hands trail to her hips and Jane’s fingers twitch with wanting to touch him.

“The brush of your loose hair on the naked skin of your back, that I know. The soft padding of your tiny feet on the carpet, unshod. The quiet left in the absence of your fussy gowns, replaced with the intimate, thin brush of the muslin of your shift. You stood more naked to me than you knew.”

“Loki—” Jane warns, her words choked.

“Your hair, I know it to be long and heavy and thick. Were I a gambler like my brother, I would wager it is also soft. But I am rather a man of science, and I test my hypotheses.”

He does, his hands in her hair, loosing it from her combs. Raking those keen fingers through the lot of it, roots to ends. Jane does moan, then.

“Like spun silk,” he says, his hypothesis spoken into law.

He tilts her head up, and she lets him, as he brings his mouth to hover over hers. “You are indeed comely, exquisite even, by the standards and measure of beauty those sighted fools find so important.”

She brings her hands to his lapels, finally giving into the urge to reciprocate contact. He steps bodily into her then, crushing her into the bookcase at her back.

She understands now, as her eyes fly open, reclaiming the sanity that exists in sight, why she always felt as if she should not find herself alone with Loki, the saturnine son of Odin. Why some part of her always warned against engaging him. The name Silvertongue, which whispers between the servants like the ripples on a lake, seems now more a warning than a sobriquet as her hands reach to test her own hypothesis that his hair is also silken. To say Loki is trouble is to say the night sky is vast; he is so much more than trouble and the night sky is infinite.

“It is the finest collection of published works on modern physics that bite into your back, Jane.” He is speaking against the skin of her neck, not kisses but something equally as igniting. “And I know it to be incomplete, the rest of the tomes secreted away in your chamber. This is why I cannot name you only comely, exquisite.”

Her eyes dart around the library, willing herself to see as much as possible, to stop hearing, to stop feeling.

“You are also clever.” His teeth nip at her jaw. “I like clever.”

“My book!” Her whisper is sharp, biting. “Kindly unhand me and give me my book!” She still holds him tightly.

His fingers nimbly pluck at the embroidery of her bodice, as if he could gather the sewn flowers into a bouquet, undo her petal by petal. “For a token, sister-mine, I will release you.”

Her eyes search his face, willing that damnable grin to divulge his intent. “A token?” She scoffs.  “Are we children?”

“You are no child, clever Jane, and I’m sure you can suppose what I would require of you.”

His smile, so persistent. So cruel.

“In exchange for a book from my own library? I couldn’t begin to guess.”

“My father’s library, and only a kiss.”

“A kiss?” She drops her hands from their deathly grip at his jacket, her voice bewildered though she knows she has no right to claim disillusionment. Her fingers ache from clinging to him.

“Does this honestly scandalize you?” He rolls his hips more firmly into her, and indeed, a kiss seems very much a token in light of the dragon’s horde that is his desire.

“No,” she admits, straightening. She has lost so much ground since the search for a new book began. She needs some measure of it back. “Though it surprises me. You think me clever, but I now think you droll and predictable.”

His smiling mouth purses, and he absently fingers a lock of her still fallen hair. “I have been thought worse.” His hand falls to her neck and the indifferent tilt to his head quickens her pulse. His voice is dead when he asks, “My token, might I have it?”

Jane should not. Jane knows she should not.

“Only a kiss?” The words sound like her last. “Very well.”   

Slowly, so slowly, the displeasure drains from his face, his mouth loosening. His lupine curl of lips is returned as he reaches to remove his smoked glass spectacles, head bowed. He places the glasses in her hand and turns his face back on her.

Jane cannot help but to gasp at the first sight of his eyes. Horrible and beautiful, like milky opals placed askew in a silver setting. If he looked a daunting specter before, the opaque stillness of his eyes places him atop a mountain in Delphi, foretelling the doom of kings.

“May you find this clever,” he says, before dropping to his knees.

She is so disarmed by his eyes that, even before she can register his movement, he swoops beneath the flounces of her skirts. She bites back a shriek when his large hands find crushing hold at her hips.

“L-Loki!” she pants, her hands gripping the shelves behind her for support. His thumbs hook into the waistband of her pantalettes, dragging them down an inch. “Loki…”

He places a searing, wet and probing kiss at the hollow inside her hipbone, employing teeth, tongue and lips. A warbling, gurgled sound bursts from Jane and Loki stills. His lips lay along the ridge of her hipbone and he speaks against it, like she were the spine of a book.

“Tell me to stop, Jane.” His voice is soft from beneath the layers of her gown. She would laugh at the absurdity of it if she were not so taken by her pantalettes dragging down another inch. “My token is won.”

His tongue slices across her abdomen, wetly caressing her in places even her husband has not traveled.

“You must tell me to stop, woman, or I will teach you the meaning of Silvertongue,” he says louder, in warning.

She shuts her eyes again, a dangerous tactic. To feel rather than see. To feel rather than think.

“Don’t—” her pantalettes slide lower. “Don’t stop.”

And as he sets his mouth on her, hungrily devouring her surrender, she thinks she may never open her eyes again. If only feeling his mouth is so sublime, if only hearing his obscene sounds of appreciation is so gratifying, why should she look upon anything ever again.  To be at the same plane as this man who thinks her clever first, comely by science, second. If she could live like this, just like this, why must she see?

And when his deep, damp, brutal kisses bring her to peak among the stars, she remembers.

Her book, still on the top shelf. Her husband, in his study. And his brother, on his knees coaxing her to come again using only his mouth.

She thinks she would rather never see anything again, but only because she might see their accusation, or her own guilt.

Loki wrests another crest from her, and Jane opens her eyes.

_**End.** _


End file.
